This is the first study of the population of London during the early modern period and it is also the first detailed book in English about the population of a European metropolitan city at this time. Villages have attracted a good deal of attention from historical demographers but very little is known about larger towns and cities. By the second half of the sixteenth century, London was firmly established as a metropolitan city. Reliable population estimates can first be made from around 1600, when the city numbered about 200,000 inhabitants, a figure which doubled during the first half of the seventeenth century. Because it contained more than 5 per cent of the population of England and was about twenty times the size of the largest provincial cities, London's importance is a recurring theme in the development of English society and economy. It is therefore difficult to study population trends in England without reference to the experience of London.

The analysis in this book is mainly concerned with the internal demography of London. It depends on the application of new techniques in historical demography, principally aggregative analysis and family reconstitution of parish registers, to the study of London population. It has always been thought the London parish registers are insufficiently reliable for this process because of the transient nature of London society and the ineffective compilation of parish registers in a metropolitan city.